


They Call Me Crazy

by Serendipity8832



Category: Ocean's Eleven Trilogy (Movies)
Genre: Caper Fic, First Meetings, M/M, Set Before the Movies, Songfic, Underage Drinking, but I think it was one of those two, but the point is Danny and Rusty, even the parts where they’re adults, idk if I meant for this to be more or less gay than it turned out to be, probably more gay tbh, the lesbians just kinda… snuck in there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-15 04:08:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29553300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serendipity8832/pseuds/Serendipity8832
Summary: Rusty huffed a laugh through his nose, staring down into his glass.  “God, this takes me back.  Do you remember—?”“Yeah.”  Danny glanced to his right, watching the last little sliver of the sun peeking over the horizon as he brought his glass to his lips.  It tasted like cheap alcohol and memories.  “We were dumb as shit back then.”A Danny/Rusty songfic that wouldn’t leave my head until I wrote it.
Relationships: Danny Ocean & Rusty Ryan, Danny Ocean/Rusty Ryan
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	They Call Me Crazy

**Author's Note:**

> So I’ve had this idea for months but I never thought I’d actually write it. Then the Ocean’s trilogy showed up on Netflix and suddenly this appeared on my computer. (That’s a lie, it took a long time and a lot of effort.) It’s based on [New Best Friend](https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=tKoveneIvI8&feature=share) by Neon Trees, which you should definitely listen to before/while you read it. It’s always given me Danny and Rusty vibes, so here we are. You can find the lyrics [here](https://genius.com/Neon-trees-new-best-friend-lyrics), they were super helpful while I was writing. For the record, anything in the song that also shows up in this fic (including the title), you can assume I got from the song. I spent many hours reading and listening to this song to try to include as much of it as I could. And thank you to the Genius user who gave me a crash course in whiskey. I couldn’t have done this without you.

You could say what you wanted about Los Angeles, Danny thought, but you couldn’t deny that the sunsets were gorgeous.

A pain in the ass sometimes, depending on what you were doing, but with Rusty driving east on I-105, the top of his beat up convertible down, evening light pouring into the backseat and the wind ruffling their hair, Danny had never appreciated a sunset more. The valley looked as though it was set on fire around them, beautiful as it burned, and for a moment he could almost believe all of that talk about dreams coming true in L.A.

Of course, the way the golden rays outlined Rusty, smiling softly with one arm hanging over the side of the car, might have had something to do with it too.

The already sparse trees along the side of the freeway thinned out even more as they approached a small pull-over area. Danny tilted his head to the right slightly; Rusty, either observing the motion out of the corner of his eye or simply thinking the same as Danny (they were equally likely, with him), slowed down and nosed the car over until they were rolling to a stop on the gravel. Danny rolled his shoulders as he stepped out of the car, grunting in faux irritation.

“You’ve gotta get a new car, Rus.” The familiar complaint was met with nothing but a chuckle from the other man.

“So, what’d you bring me?” he asked as Danny reached into the backseat, lifting up a brown paper bag. With a grin and a flourish, he pulled two bottles from the bag. Rusty raised an eyebrow, eyes glittering with amusement. “Canadian? Come on, Danny, you know me better than that.” The untrained ear would have missed the fondness that accompanied the exasperation in his voice.

“Come on, Rus,” Danny parroted back. “For old time’s sake.”

Rusty sighed and rolled his eyes, but Danny didn’t miss how the corner of his lips twitched upward as he took the bottles of Coke and Crown Royal so Danny could fish around for the glasses hiding in the bottom of the bag. The clear rims caught the burning light as Danny poured the soda, maybe a little generously in Rusty’s glass, then the whiskey. They sat next to each other on the hood of Rusty’s car, sipping their drinks as the sunlight finally started fading around them. It was interesting, how a place could be lit up the color of hell but feel so much like heaven.

“Did you know,” and Danny already knew what Rusty was going to say, but let him finish anyway, “that they used to put actual cocaine in Coke?”

“I did know that,” Danny replied. “Might explain some of what we got up to as kids. Not all of it, mind you.”

Rusty huffed a laugh through his nose, staring down into his glass. “God, this takes me back. Do you remember—?”

“Yeah.” Danny glanced to his right, watching the last little sliver of the sun peeking over the horizon as he brought his glass to his lips. It tasted like cheap alcohol and memories. “We were dumb as shit back then.” He looked back at Rusty, who looked over at him, and suddenly they were both chuckling, although something about the atmosphere, the nostalgia maybe, kept them from dissolving into full-blown hysterics.

* * *

It was an accident, really, that they even met at all.

Danny hadn’t even meant to eavesdrop on those kids talking behind the cafeteria. He certainly hadn’t intended to slow down just enough to listen as one of them mentioned some sort of get together that Saturday.

“You don’t know him because he doesn’t go here,” the guy had said. “He’s a sophomore at a different school. I met him at a party a couple weeks ago. Said his parents were going out of town this weekend and he wanted to do something, but he didn’t want it to be huge, only twenty people or so.”

If Danny’s interest hadn’t already been piqued by that (small parties were almost better than big ones, less chance of the cops being called), then it certainly would have been by the fact that he recognized the address, and it was close enough for him to walk there from where he lived. After that, well, it wasn’t as though he could just not go, now was it?

Which was how, at about eleven that Saturday night, Danny found himself ringing the doorbell of a tastefully ostentatious (and wasn’t _that_ quite the oxymoron?) house at the end of a concerningly long driveway. He fixed his patented Ocean smile as the door opened to reveal a kid Danny certainly hadn’t seen before. Oh no, he would have remembered.

The kid’s blond hair was just short enough to clear his brow; any longer and it would have been falling in his clear blue eyes. He was wearing a flashy button up that looked to be just slightly too big for him, a red Solo cup in one hand and a half-eaten pretzel stick held against it with a single finger. What really caught Danny’s attention, though, was his smile. It was the same sort of easy, charming grin that Danny himself was sporting at that very moment. Suddenly it all felt very Western-esque, except instead of pointing pistols at each other, they were flashing teeth.

The kid leaned against the doorframe. “What brings you around here?” he asked, as though he was oblivious to the sound of voices and music emanating from the hallway behind him.

“Heard about this thing from my friend Rick,” Danny lied, making a show of peering around him. “Not sure he’s here yet.”

“Hmm, Rick? Oh, he friends with George?” His voice had the kind of easy drawl that implied he didn’t really care, although Danny was sure his answer would matter.

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

The kid nodded once and stepped aside, gesturing with his cup. Apparently Danny had passed the test. “Come on in, then. Drinks are on the kitchen counter, try not to break anything irreplaceable.”

“No promises,” Danny said as he brushed past, eliciting a chuckle from the kid. The door swung shut behind him, and he was in.

The house didn’t have a foyer, thankfully, but the hallway back to the living room was longer than it had any right to be. There had to be a little less than two dozen high schoolers milling around, sipping drinks and talking on the couches, some already well on their way to tipsy. They all looked like they belonged in a house worth that much money, the kid included, although that would make sense seeing as it was his place. The aforementioned kitchen counter was off to the right, in full view of the living room thanks to the open floor plan, and already had cups lined up in somewhat neat rows. Danny snagged one; he wasn’t planning on drinking too much, but if you weren’t holding a drink everyone was bound to offer you one. A quick taste had him fighting to keep his expression neutral. Someone had been heavy-handed. He wasn’t even sure there was any soda in these, although the (mostly full) Coke bottles on the counter next to the half-empty whiskey ones indicated that there was at least a little bit.

Yeah, Danny might not have been drinking heavily, but everyone else sure was. He smiled to himself behind his cup. Drunk teenagers were the easiest marks in the book; this was shaping up to be a lucrative evening for him, and much more interesting than counting down the days till graduation.

No sense getting into it now, though, not when most of them could still see straight. So he made the rounds, talking to the few people he knew and talking like he knew the rest of them, and keeping tabs on the host of this whole gathering out of the corner of his eye. He seemed like he was making rounds too, smiling and laughing with each of his guests, and always eating or drinking something. For a moment Danny wondered how he’d even managed to make it through the front door, since it seemed like the kid really did know everyone else well.

(It was too early, then, for Danny to recognize him at work, the false emotion behind his sparkling eyes and the practiced ease with which he spoke. No, that would come later, after enough jobs that they started to think on the same frequency.)

It didn’t take long for the other kids to start stumbling about, spilling their drinks slightly as they poured and dancing unsteadily to the suddenly louder music. A guy pulled his giggling girlfriend down a hallway, his friends catcalling from one end of the largest couch. The party was really getting going now, Danny thought as he scanned the crowd.

The easy part was lifting the wallet. It was much more difficult to slip it back where it belonged without getting noticed, and ordinarily Danny wouldn’t have bothered, but it was too warm for a coat, and even blurry-eyed, people would start asking questions if they saw him carrying half a dozen wallets in his pants pockets. So he pinched their cash, stuffed it into his own wallet, and when the opportunity presented itself, returned the significantly less valuable object to its owner. He got lucky a couple of times: a steadying hand on the waist of a guy on his way to get another drink, the neglected purses of two girls aggressively making out against the wall next to the bathroom. By the time he felt a featherlight touch against his own back pocket, he’d already knocked over six of the partygoers (he’d gone for eight, but found the second and third to last wallets mysteriously empty).

There was a sharp inhale by his right ear as Danny’s fingers encircled the wrist of the offender. He made sure his grip was secure before turning around, but whoever it was seemed to have accepted that they’d been caught. Danny’s eyebrows rose involuntarily when he saw who it was, just for a moment, but he could tell the other noticed.

“You always rob your friends?” he asked the kid, who flashed him a crooked smile.

“Only when I feel like it,” he responded. Danny nodded and, after a second’s consideration, released his hold. The kid tucked his hand into his pocket, in a show of goodwill, maybe. Danny could keep an eye on it there.

“So, how many did you get?” he asked just before the silence became awkward. The kid tilted his head to the side before his eyes widened slightly.

“Five, why?”

It was Danny’s turn to sport a slanted grin. “Well, I got six.”

The kid gaped at him for a moment before smiling and shaking his head. Danny’s eyes tracked the movement as his tongue ran over his teeth. “I should have known,” he muttered.

“Don’t beat yourself up over it,” Danny said, clapping him on the shoulder. “I’m a professional.”

“A professional,” he echoed, lifting an eyebrow skeptically.

“Yep,” Danny replied, rocking back on his heels. “Hey, want to make this more interesting?”

“I don’t know, do I?” the kid countered. Danny chuckled.

“Yeah, you do. Goes like this: we work the rest of this little kickback, and whoever has more cash by the time everyone’s cleaned out gets to keep it all. You in?”

The kid seemed to consider it, but Danny knew it was just for show. He had him hook, line and sinker. “Yeah, all right,” he said, and Danny took a step back, still smiling.

“See you on the other side, then!”

An hour and a half later, and Danny had become intimately acquainted with every wallet and purse in the house. Well, all of them except the kid’s, he supposed. None of the other partygoers were the wiser, of course. Danny had meant it when he’d implied that he was good at what he did, and it seemed that the kid was too. He caught his eye across the room before stepping out the back door to lean against the wall of the house. There wasn’t really anything interesting out there, no pool or the like, so nobody had seen fit to move the festivities.

He’d counted his total before the kid’s back hit the wall next to him, but he waited politely for him to tally his up.

“Three sixteen, how about you?” He rolled his eyes at Danny’s slow smile. “Come on, don’t do this to me. That’s not very nice of you.”

“Says the kid who tried to lift my wallet earlier tonight.”

“It wasn’t personal!” he protested.

Danny let him stew a few moments longer before showing his own stack. “Three thirty four.”

“Really? Let me see that.” Danny had to hand it to the kid: he was quick. He’d snatched the money out of Danny’s hand before he even realized what was happening.

“What, now you don’t trust me?” Danny knew he did mock-offended well. The kid squinted at him before returning his attention to the bills.

“Well, forgive me for questioning the word of a self-proclaimed ‘professional’ pickpocket.” He handed them back to Danny with a sigh, having confirmed his number. “Damn. Guess this is yours then,” he said, holding out his own cash. Danny just waved him off. He hadn’t missed the flash of disappointment that crossed the kid’s features.

“Keep it. I was never gonna take your hard-earned cash from you.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. I just wanted to see what you could do with the stakes a little higher.” The kid nodded, declining to comment. They lapsed into a comfortable silence until Danny twisted his head to find the kid looking at him. He held his gaze, although if it hadn’t been so dark Danny might have been able to see the faint blush dusting the other’s cheeks.

“You got a name, kid?” he asked.

“Rusty,” he answered, sticking his hand out. It was an invitation, clearly, and Danny figured after everything else he’d put the kid— _Rusty_ —through, he owed him that much.

“Danny,” he offered, shaking Rusty’s hand. “Thanks.”

“For what?” The poor kid seemed genuinely perplexed, as though he didn’t get people thanking him very often. Danny thought he’d try to fix that, if he were in any sort of position to.

“For the most fun I’ve had in the last few years. Possibly ever.”

Rusty smiled. It wasn’t inherently different from any of the other smiles he’d shown throughout the night, except slightly darker without the lights of the house shining directly on it, but something about it seemed a little more genuine to Danny. Ah well, that might have been wishful thinking.

“It is more enjoyable to have a little competition, isn’t it.” The way he said it sounded more like a statement than a question. Danny nodded. He knew that well enough, with his family.

“There was never a George, was there?” he asked on the tail end of another quiet period.

“Well, there was never a Rick, either,” Rusty fired back. Danny shrugged, essentially conceding the point.

“So why’d you let me in, if you knew I was lying? I thought this was supposed to be a ‘few good friends’ sort of a thing.”

Rusty narrowed his eyes at Danny. “You really did think I’d steal from my friends, didn’t you? I think I’m gonna take offense to that. I don’t actually know most of these people, I just picked them because they seemed like the type that wouldn’t miss a few dollars in the long run.”

“Well, you had me fooled,” Danny said, chuckling slightly. “Good on you, kid. You mind if I head out? Got everything I came for, at this point.” Maybe more, a voice in the back of his head supplied.

“Oh.” Danny definitely wasn’t imagining the disappointment in Rusty’s voice. In his line of work, you couldn’t afford to kid yourself about what the people around you were feeling. “You got somewhere to be?”

Danny hummed noncommittally. “Not really, but I don’t want to be kicking around if and when someone in there notices they’re thirty dollars poorer than when they arrived.”

“Neither do I,” Rusty said, which earned the distinction of honest to God taking Danny aback.

“Isn’t this your house?” he asked after a moment of stunned silence. Rusty laughed.

“Nah, these people just pay me to mow their lawn every two weeks. The wife mentioned they were going away for the weekend, thought I’d take advantage.”

“Huh. Wait, ‘mentioned?’ As in, they didn’t ask you to house sit for them?”

At this, Rusty finally looked a bit abashed. He glanced at his feet before looking back up at Danny. “I, uh, picked the lock?”

Danny took the space of his next blink to process this information before laughing a little too loudly. At Rusty’s surprised expression, he slung his arm across the other boy’s shoulders. “Come on, you crazy kid, let’s blow this joint. Got anywhere for us to go?”

“I think there’s a 7-Eleven down the road,” he offered, still seeming a bit shocked. Danny steered them toward the fence surrounding the backyard.

“Perfect. I’m buying.”

* * *

Rusty surprised Danny that night.

Of course, no one else in the bar would have been able to tell that the great Daniel Ocean had been caught off guard, but he could tell from Rusty’s little smirk as he sipped his Jack and Coke that the other man knew what he had done. Distantly Danny noted that it had been years since that had happened.

“Got something to say?” Rusty asked over the rim of the glass. Danny shrugged, slipping back into his cool, collected persona as easily as donning a favorite jacket.

“Now who’s feeling nostalgic?” he retorted. Rusty huffed out a laugh.

“Not enough to drink Crown.”

“For you, sir?” the bartender asked. Danny tilted his head in Rusty’s direction.

“I’ll have what he’s having.”

Rusty raised an eyebrow at him. “And here I thought you were a purist.”

“Only when I can rope you in.”

They sat in silence for several moments after Danny’s drink arrived. He had no trouble admitting the Jack was an improvement over the drinks he’d made the other night, but it was close enough that it still felt steeped in the past. Surveying the crowd, he could almost imagine they were young and dumb again, still figuring out their place in the world, that their place in the world was _theirs_ , a joint occupation. Of course, a single glance at the man to his right put an end to such daydreams. Rusty was still the same person he’d always been, but he’d changed a lot too. They both had. He sat with the kind of easy confidence that came from experience rather than youthful delusions, and he had this look in his eye like he was thinking of bigger things than the potential marks in the room with him. He didn’t look like a kid anymore, either, although Danny thought the extra years looked good on him.

Three drinks later, Rusty glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. “You never really—”

“Why would I want to?” Danny countered.

“Mm. Not even—?”

“Well, maybe, but—”

“Yeah, so did everyone.”

“And if I did—”

“Yeah.”

Danny swirled his glass, watching the liquid circle its container. It had soaked into his bones at this point, it felt like, warm and tinged with just the slightest bit of sadness. “Did you, Rus?”

Rusty sighed, and Danny thought it sounded a little more rueful than it probably should. “Yeah, when we were kids. But it was—”

“A futile endeavor.” Rusty nodded. “But if you had—”

“That’s true.” 

Danny smiled, first into his drink, then up at Rusty, who seemed slightly buoyed by the reminder. “Besides,” he said, “the black sheep always have the most fun.”

Rusty grinned back, the soft lighting in the bar reflecting off of his smile.

The sun was just barely rising when they stumbled out of the building, leaning on each other for support. Rusty hailed a taxi and Danny practically fell in on top of him when he opened the door. It was a joint effort to give the driver their hotel for a destination. Rusty slumped over as soon as the vehicle started moving, resting his head on Danny’s shoulder. The alcohol had already begun wearing off, this contact sending a different sort of buzz through his body.

“We’re getting too old for this,” Rusty mumbled. Danny laughed.

* * *

If their first meeting had been an accident, their second certainly had the appearance of one as well. In reality, Danny had been strategically strolling by the house for a couple of weeks, hoping to catch Rusty mowing the lawn like he’d said he did, but when the kid was finally out there he figured he could just keep that information to himself.

“Hey, Rusty!” he called from the road, raising a hand in greeting. Rusty paused in the middle of the yard, squinting out at Danny before lifting his own hand in response.

“Danny,” he said as the boy walked closer. “Almost didn’t recognize you in daylight.”

“Good to see they let you come back.”

“Why wouldn’t they?” Rusty ran a hand through his hair, pushing it back from where sweat was making it stick to his forehead. Danny unconsciously mirrored the motion, looking across the yard toward the house. 

“Well, some people don’t like it when their house is destroyed by a bunch of teenagers.”

Rusty rolled his eyes. “I was always gonna come back and clean up. Besides, I had to return the shirt.”

“I see.” Somehow, the fact that Rusty had stolen—ah, _borrowed_ —that shirt made the entire night that much more amusing.

“So what brings you by?”

“Just out for a walk.” Danny stuffed his hands in his pockets, the picture of nonchalant. That was integral to the next part. “Actually, though, I’ve been meaning to talk to you. Got an idea that I think you could help me with.”

“Oh?” Rusty leaned against the handle of the lawn mower, just as casual as Danny. “What sort of idea?”

Danny smiled, all teeth, and knew he had Rusty by the way he raised just one eyebrow in silent curiosity. “You said you were decent at picking locks, right?”

“Hey! I’m not paying you to stand around chatting with your friends!”

Rusty turned at the shout, Danny peering around him to see an older man sitting on the front porch of the house. He watched as the man got up, folding his newspaper and setting it down on the footrest by his chair. A closer look revealed that he was, in fact, wearing the same shirt Rusty had worn at the party.

“Well, that’s my cue,” Danny said, stepping back. “Meet me at the 7-Eleven tonight? I’ll tell you all about it.”

“See you there,” Rusty replied as he started mowing again. Danny barely kept himself from glancing back as he walked away, resisting the urge to whistle the rest of the way home.

The idea was this: there was a jewelry store in a strip mall not too far from the house where they’d first met. Danny’d had his eye on it for a while, but it would have been too difficult to break in on his own to make it worth the effort. With a partner, though, it was back on the table.

“Wait, so we’re stealing jewelry? You got somewhere to sell it?”

Danny shook his head. “Not the jewelry, it’d be too hard to move. They’ve got a safe in the back office, with a lot more cash in it than regular stores.”

Rusty leaned back slightly on the bench seat, eyeing Danny with an appraising grin. They’d relocated to a picnic table in a park that was technically closed for the night, just to have a little more privacy in discussing their criminal activities. “You’ve thought this through, haven’t you.” It didn’t sound like a question.

“It would be downright idiotic if I hadn’t,” Danny said anyway.

“So what’s the plan?”

“I’m glad you asked.” Danny propped his elbows on the table between them, more for the dramatic pose than anything else. “The strip mall closes at midnight on weekdays, the jewelry store a couple hours before that. Two a.m. next Thursday we arrive. First, I cut the wire for the alarm.”

That was about as easy as it could have been. Wires for everything in the store, including the alarm, passed through a gray metal box on the wall a few feet to the right of the back door. The bottom left screw was a little rusted, but eventually Danny managed to twist it out and pry the front panel of the box off. After that, it was a simple matter of snipping the red wire. It wasn’t marked as the one for the alarm, but Danny had been around the block a time or two. It was always the red one.

“While I’m doing that, you work on the door.”

That, too, went as well as expected. Rusty really was good with locks; Danny heard the deadbolt click just as he finished screwing the front panel back on, which meant he’d already picked the lock in the doorknob. After witnessing that, he wasn’t surprised that the kid had gotten into that house so easily.

“Then you keep an eye out for trouble while I crack the safe.”

“So I’m just a glorified lookout, then.” Danny shrugged at Rusty’s vague disappointment, not bothering to offer an apology for something he wasn’t actually sorry for. “Eh, I figured that would be about it.”

“So you’re in?”

“I’m in.”

Of course, that last step was where the plan started showing some cracks.

“What’s taking you so long?”

“Shh, I’m working on it. Give me a minute.”

“I gave you several, you should have had it open by now.”

“Oh really? You want to give it a go?”

“Yeah, move over.”

“I didn’t—that was _sarcastic_ —”

“Just go keep watch or something, let me do this.”

Danny had to give the kid credit; he had the balls to kick Danny off of his job, even if he felt it was undeserved. Nevertheless, after a moment of moderately surprised silence, Danny got up and walked to the other side of the office, alternating between peering out into the inky darkness of the lot behind the strip mall and the similarly black interior of the jewelry store. As long as everything stayed that dark, they were in the clear.

“You done yet?” he whispered back to Rusty, who merely shushed him. Danny rolled his eyes, returning his attention to the front of the store. Oh, that was interesting. It was soft, but he thought he could hear….

“Hey kid,” he whispered as he edged through the door to the rest of the store, trying to figure out if that really was a car engine idling in front of it. And the plan promptly shattered into pieces.

It was a car engine that Danny had heard. The engine of a cop car, in fact, and he found this out in the worst way possible, because the jewelry store had motion sensing lights that very clearly illuminated both him and the cops as soon as he stepped out into the main room.

“Shit shit shit,” he muttered as he threw himself back into the office with enough force to slam the door shut behind him. “We have to go _now_.”

“What? What’s going on?” Rusty asked, looking up from where he was crouched on the floor next to the safe. Danny was already halfway out the back door, waiting for Rusty to get a move on.

“Cops are here,” he whispered, gesturing back at the other door. Rusty followed the motion, catching sight of the light filtering in around the wood. The look he fixed Danny with could have melted straight through the safe.

“You _set off the lights?_ ” he hissed. 

“They were here before that!” Danny insisted as the sound of a door opening in the front of the store drifted back to them.

“You can come out now,” a voice called out. “We know you’re there.”

Danny decided he was done waiting, instead grabbing Rusty’s arm and hauling him out the back door. Fortunately the cops hadn’t surrounded the store, so Danny took off, trusting that Rusty would follow.

“I thought you said you cut the alarm!” the kid bit out from somewhere to his right. Danny smiled; at least he was there.

“They must have had a second, silent one!” He knew his attempts to defend himself were in vain, but still, he tried.

They kept running until Danny was sure they were far enough away to avoid being implicated, stumbling into a 24-hour convenience store (not a 7-Eleven, amazingly enough) to the extreme shock of the tired cashier.

“I’m never working with you again,” Rusty muttered as they made their way to the candy aisle, trying to look like they had a purpose in being there. Danny tossed him a slanted smile.

“Aww, you don’t mean that.”

“No, I do. If you making that plan was like stacking up a house of cards, what just happened was like watching as it all fell apart. Imploded. Collided with a brick wall.”

“It was something of a perfect storm, wasn’t it?” Danny chuckled at the thought, and after a moment found he couldn’t stop. He ended up rolling on the floor, wheezing with laughter as Rusty looked on, valiantly attempting to maintain his irritation in the face of his growing amusement.

“You’re crazy, you know that? Absolutely insane,” he said, nudging Danny with his toe as the other boy finally calmed down. He looked up as he pushed himself upright, head coming level with a box of Reese’s, grinning at the smile that Rusty couldn’t quite keep off of his face.

“That makes you crazy too, for agreeing to do this,” he said, and Rusty didn’t bother arguing. He offered Danny his hand, pulling him up just as the cashier appeared at the end of the aisle.

“If you’re not going to buy anything, you have to leave,” she said, seemingly bored and wary of them at the same time. Danny met Rusty’s gaze; neither of them had any money, so they followed her directive, walking back out into the cool night air.

“It’s gonna be a long walk back,” Rusty noted, sounding more resigned than anything else.

“You can crash at my place if it’s closer,” Danny offered. Rusty just laughed.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight,” he said by way of explanation.

“Fair enough. Big jobs come with that kind of rush.”

“Yeah, especially when you almost get caught.”

It was Danny’s turn to laugh at the affected bitterness in Rusty’s voice. “You did good, kid,” he said, ruffling his hair before dropping his arm across his shoulders like he had at the party. “I’ve got a feeling you’re gonna be my new best friend.”

**Author's Note:**

> Oh boy, I’ve got a lot of thoughts about this, so I’ll try to keep it brief.
> 
> I love the idea that Danny and Rusty could just always do that telepathic thing, but I’m also a sucker for the idea that they developed it over many years of working closely together, getting to know each other and trusting each other more, so that’s why I had them speak in full sentences as teenagers. Also, I really like writing dialogue.
> 
> I’m not sure I really got their dynamic down, especially when they’re younger, but I watched the first movie like four times in the last two weeks as research and I tried really hard, so I’m posting this anyway.
> 
> Although their failure was inspired by the "stacking up my house of cards, gonna watch them as they fall apart" bit of the song, I think it would be absolutely hilarious if the first job Danny and Rusty pulled together was a complete disaster and every future job they do Rusty remembers the first one and wonders fondly why he ever agreed to work with Danny again after it.
> 
> Danny’s a senior in the parts where they’re in high school, which is why he calls Rusty (a sophomore) “kid.”
> 
> Lastly, I personally believe Rusty’s convertible just popped into existence as old and beat up as it is now. It was never a new car and it’s also never going away. That scene in Ocean’s 12 where it got blown up was fake news.


End file.
